AI engineering glossary · Agents tools MCP
What is tool retrieval?
Tool retrieval: Choosing a small set of relevant tools for each request by searching over tool descriptions, often with embeddings, instead of listing every tool to the model. It keeps prompts short and improves selection when the tool catalogue is large.
Tool retrieval: an example
From 300 internal API tools, the system embeds the user query, finds the five closest tool descriptions, and shows only those.
Related terms
More Agents tools MCP terms
- Tool selection
- Toolformer
- Tracing
- Trajectory evaluation
- Verifier
- Voyager
- Web search tool
- Workflow versus agent
Where you learn it
Tool retrieval is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.